Demonstration of Single-Pass Millimeterwave SAR Tomography for Forest Volumes

In this letter, for the first time, the potential of millimeterwave synthetic aperture radar (SAR) is investigated with respect to a tomographic analysis of forest volumes. Exploiting both parametric and nonparametric SAR tomography (TomoSAR) methods designed for both discrete and continuous reflectivity profiles, it is shown that even Ka-band signals with a wavelength of only 8.55 mm can penetrate the tree canopy to a certain extent and allow a separation of ground and tree crowns. First experimental results exploiting airborne multiantenna data are evaluated with respect to LiDAR ground truth and indicate a promising perspective.